Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Over the years, there has been a variety of cross-pollination
between the various traditions of Western Goetia, Evocation, Voodoo, and
Hoodoo. Particularly interesting is the use of veves in Voodoo, a practice which we can attribute to Spanish Catholics exposing the
African Americans to Goetia in the 1600's and 1700's. Santeria makes
use of statues of Catholic Saints to represent its African gods. In
ancient Greece, there is the theurgic tradition of using statues as
well. Within these temples or shrines, the effigies were said to move
and speak to the faithful. (Jake Stratton-Kent examines this in his excellent 2
volume work, Geosophia.)

Many years ago, I came up with the idea to work in a similar manner
as in Santaria, but rather with classical Greek and Roman statuary. It
would be challenging and prohibitively expensive to make a statue for each spirit or angel I had
ever worked with, but this is what I
wanted to do. Meditating on the idea, I came up with a solution, which
was that I would only make seven statues, one for each planet.

What makes the Inner Order of the Golden Dawn system different from other older traditions,
is the introduction of modular tools. In the Golden Dawn, (or more
correctly, the RR et AC tradition), certain flashing colours are
employed to represent planetary and other astrological forces. For
example, the Adept can use the Lotus Wand to invoke the astrological
forces via the coloured bands or grips. If I was to make up statues of
the planets, I could use them to invoke the various gods, angels and
spirits, but in a modular fashion. For example, all the Venusian
characters, such as YHVH Tzabaoth, Hanael, Kedemial, Astarte, Aphrodite,
etc., could be invoked in a theurgic manner into a statue of Venus as a
material basis.

There first problem with this new formula was that I wanted to be
able to use it for seal-based evocations as well as theurgy and the
sigils would result in concentrating the sephirotic or planetary
energies too specifically into certain names, which I knew would result
in mildly kelipotic manifestations when I tried to switch pantheons. In
the old order, some of the Adepti experimented with making a second set
of elemental tools but without sigils, so I made the assumption that by
extension these statues could also be left somewhat plain, to
accommodate a variety of names for the one force being employed. This
overcame my first concern.

The second problem is the cleansing of the statue between
entities. Thankfully, the Inner Order Z2 for evocation presents a
highly effective license to depart and then banishing formula that
doesn't appear elsewhere in magical literature.

Depicted above is a photo of one of the deities I have worked with. It is a
statue of Venus, after the Botticelli painting. For more information,
see my book Adept Magic in the Golden Dawn Tradition, which may now be pre-ordered from the publisher Kerubim Press.

About Me

VH Frater Yod Shin Yod is an author and keen student of the Golden Dawn, and blogs to express his ideas about the tradition. He is a current Chief of Thuban Temple, the Mother Temple of the Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn.